Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

Sabra bent low to look into Andrew’s eyes with all the hate in the world. Her knife raised up again. And the Angel Mallory raised her gun and yelled, “No!”

The two women stared at one another above his kneeling body.

“You don’t understand,” said Sabra, as she retreated a few steps.

“Everyone tells me that, and I’m getting damned sick of it,” said Mallory. “I understand revenge-I understand obsession. I’ve understood these things for a long, long time.”

Sabra looked down at Andrew’s sorry face, raising her knife, not heeding the gun Mallory leveled at her head, but only advancing on her next target-himself. He bowed his head. He was ready.

Mallory lowered the gun barrel and moved her own body between Sabra and Andrew. One hand flashed out, and she was holding Sabra’s knife hand by the wrist. Something close to perfect understanding passed between them. Mallory released her grip on Sabra’s bloody wrist, and the woman backed away from her, nodding. Mallory inclined her head in homage to the pain and rage in the older woman’s eyes. She stared into Sabra’s face as though it were a looking glass, a view into the madness of long-unfinished business, obsession without end.

“Andrew’s not a killer. Trust me to know my killers, Sabra. It’s my gift. Your brother told you about the letter that came to us with Andrew’s review?”

She nodded, and Mallory went on. “Andrew wanted the truth to come out. That’s why he wrote that letter. He wanted everyone to know. And now you have to let him live so he can tell the story. The story is important. It’s the end of unfinished business. It’s what you’ve wanted all these years. Let Andrew tell it. How could you live without hearing it? I couldn’t.”

Sabra sat down on the terrace flagstones.

Mallory looked at the blood on her hands. It was Sabra’s blood, streaming from the holes in her body. The gun in Emma Sue’s frozen grip was a.22. Still, the shots were well placed. What kept this woman going she did not know, unless it was this, the end of the story.

“I believe you, all right? I’m sure Dr. Ramsharan is a very decent person.”

Quinn had always genuinely liked Charles Butler. But early on, he had realized that this charming man didn’t live on the same planet with the rest of them. On Charles’s homeworld, people were all good neighbors and exceedingly kind to strangers. The lions all lay down with the lambs, and discord was restricted to the screams of fresh-cut flowers. He wondered how Charles’s ideal world fared in tandem with this stroll down the hall in the company of a man who was dripping blood on the carpet.

As they waited for the elevator, Quinn was saying, “We should agree on a story for the doctor. We’ll tell her I had an accident while I was showing you my gun collection.”

“Do you have a gun collection?”

“No, but it doesn’t- Oh, I see your point. Best not to clutter it up with unnecessary lies. We’ll say I slipped on a scatter rug while holding a gun. Now that’s reasonable. Most New Yorkers have at least one gun.”

“Do you have one?”

“Yes, everybody has one.”

“I don’t. And you were showing it to me? Henrietta knows I don’t care for the sight of guns. So it’s hardly likely that-”

“All right. I was removing the gun from my desk drawer to get at something beneath the gun.”

They stepped into the elevator, and Quinn slumped against the back wall, leaving a bloodstain there. As Charles pushed the button for the third floor, the large man’s face gave away his deep concern.

Quinn closed his eyes. So tired. His left hand was slick with the blood which leaked from the hole in his arm. His eyes opened again at the prompt of a gentle tug on the sleeve of his good arm.

“Now about the scatter rug behind the desk,” said Charles. “Odd place for a rug, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the desk chair tend to keep the rug from slipping around?”

“All right. I was removing the gun from the drawer of a table -which has a scatter rug in front of it.”

“Bit clumsy slipping on the rug that way. And do you usually keep loaded guns about?”

“So I’ll admit to being slightly drunk and inexperienced with firearms.” So tired. Not thinking straight, not straight at all. “Now you’ll swear you were there and witnessed the whole thing. That might persuade her not to file a report. But if she still insists on it, I can always buy her off. You can buy anyone in New York City. Remember, Mallory’s name shouldn’t enter the conversation.”

He had the idea that Charles was not listening to his instructions. The soft-spoken giant seemed somewhat distracted as they emerged from the elevator and walked toward the door of apartment 3A.

“Charles, perhaps you’d better let me handle it from here on. Somehow, I don’t think guile is your forte.”

Charles smiled gently as he nodded and pressed the doorbell. When the door was opened by a dark-haired woman in a long white robe, he pointed to Quinn’s bloody arm, saying, “Mallory shot him, and we want to hush it up, all right?”

“Yes, of course,” said the woman. “Come in.”

Quinn lurched forward. His last thought before he fainted was that this woman must hail from Charles Butler’s planet, for she opened her arms wide to receive his falling body and to stain her robe with the blood of a stranger.

“No one murdered Peter Ariel,” said Andrew, as he began his story in a monotone. “He was stoned on drugs and very clumsy. I was there when the artwork fell on top of him. He was killed instantly. Koozeman was furious. All that planning and promotion for nothing. He’d done such a brilliant job launching this career, despite the lack of talent. He had Emma Sue and myself as the critics to promote Peter in newspapers. Dean Starr doubled as a critic and a publicist. That’s all his art magazine ever was, you know, a public relations plug for artists who were willing to pay for their reviews. But then it was all for nothing. The artist was killed by his own work, a potential joke of the art world.

“By the time Emma Sue arrived, Dean had come up with the idea to make it look like murder, to sensationalize the death and try to salvage something from sales of the artwork. Well, what was the harm in that? Peter Ariel was already dead. We’d pooled a lot of money to grease a lot of hands-editors of art magazines, and a promised slot in a museum group show. It was a major investment for all of us.”

He fell silent for a moment, losing the threads to this ramble. Mallory touched his shoulder and asked, “Was it Koozeman’s idea to butcher the body and work it into the sculpture?”

“Yes, Koozeman’s idea… Starr loved the concept and so did Emma Sue. All they had to work with was the fire axe from the box with the extinguisher. They underestimated the time it would take to cut up the body parts. All three of them took off their clothes and went to work. I stood by the door to keep watch. It was hard work, cutting up a body with that small axe, but once they got into the rhythm of it, it went much faster. My job was to call out if anything untoward happened-say if Quinn showed early. Had we left him a message then? I can’t remember. If anything happened, if anyone came, I was to call out and give them time to get through the door in the wall. I had no blood on me. I would say I’d just discovered the body. We’d thought of everything, almost everything.

“I could hear what they were doing in the room behind me. There was no door I could close. The noise was as sickening as the stench. Once, I turned around. It was an incredible sight, the three of them, naked and bloody, working over the body.

“It was then, while my back was turned, that Aubry came in. I swear I believed I had locked that door. But I was drunk that night-I’ve been drunk every night since. Aubry shouldn’t have been there. We’d left a message to send her to New Jersey. It was so incredible that she should show up at the gallery. It was the last thing we expected. We’d only meant to use her name to bait Quinn into coming. We needed him, his name linked to Peter Ariel in the press. Koozeman said Quinn would not be able to resist a comment on the artwork of the butchered body. You see, Koozeman had been a promising sculptor once, and now he was determined that this was to be the best piece of work he’d ever done. But now here was Aubry, and the whole thing was coming undone.